Linked List: January 2007

Wednesday, 31 January 2007

Stairways Software Pty Ltd today announced the acquisition of Stairways Software’s flagship program, Interarchy, by Nolobe Pty Ltd. In what amounts to an employee buyout, lead developer Matthew Drayton has formed Nolobe Pty Ltd and acquired all rights to Interarchy, the award winning file transfer and web maintenance client.

Matthew Drayton has been leading the development of Interarchy for some years now, so customers can expect the same level of quality software development and innovative features as Nolobe continues to develop and enhance Interarchy going forward. Nolobe will honour all existing licenses, and expects to release a new free upgrade (8.5) soon before continuing work on the next major release (9.0) due out later this year.

Update: Now they’ve arrested the guy who put these things up, “charged under a new statute that makes it a crime to place, transfer or possess a hoax device that results in panic” — despite the fact that they weren’t intended as anything other than innocent advertisements. In what way is this a hoax? Ludicrous.

If you are in the market for a new Windows PC because your old
computer is outdated or otherwise failing on you, Vista is your best
bet, all experts agree. That’s even if you’re considering buying a
Mac, said David Litchfield, a noted security bug hunter.

If you’re looking for “a new Windows PC”, yeah, a Mac probably isn’t a good choice.

“If you’re looking to buy a new computer, the security features
built into Vista tip the balance in its favor over other options
such as Mac OS X,” Litchfield said. “We’ve moved beyond the days of
lots of bugs and worms. Recent history shows that Microsoft can get
it right, as they did with XP SP2. With Vista, they will again
demonstrate that.”

Anil Dash on the odd backlash against Flickr’s requirement that early Flickr adopters soon switch to using a Yahoo ID to sign in:

Any information that users are afraid of Yahoo having is clearly already available to the company, since the servers are all hosted in the same place and connected together — this is just a formality. Frankly, I watch online communities a lot and am only rarely baffled by the vagaries of mob justice. But this one has me stumped.

Last year’s silver Shuffles shipped with Apple’s old, somewhat uncomfortable, and bass-weak earbuds, even though the Shuffle came out after two new iPod/iPod Nano models that had lighter, better earbuds. Today, all of the Shuffles come with Apple’s latest earphones, which are also sold separately for $29 as Apple iPod Earphones.

Clint Ecker does a nice job connecting the dots, and the answer seems to be that the iPhone is using a Samsung CPU, probably either the ARM1156 or ARM1176 — neither of which has actually been released yet. Perhaps that’s why Apple’s been so tight-lipped regarding the CPU — that they’re under NDA from Samsung until the processor has been released.

I’m happy to announce that Apple is contributing some major
extensions to the LLVM ARM backend. The improvements include support
for ARM v4/v6, vfp support, soft float, pre/postinc support, load/
store multiple generation, constant pool entry motion (to support
large functions), and support for the darwin/arm ABI.

In other words, more evidence that the iPhone is using an ARM processor, and that Apple is using LLVM to get higher performance out of what is, compared to a Mac, the iPhone’s wimpy CPU and GPU. (John Siracusa had some good background pieces on LLVM a few months ago.) It’s worth pointing out that Lattner declined to comment on whether this was actually related to the iPhone, but, well, come on.

Tuesday, 30 January 2007

One slot in The Deck for February is open. If you have a product or service that could benefit by being in front of millions of creative, web and design professionals, and you can pull the trigger quick, give us a holler. We’ll cut you a nice deal.

Because of this, we are now accepting third-party writers to contribute articles. We are still striving to deliver feature-length articles and tutorials just like before, but we need a little bit of help to keep the site going on a consistent basis.

In total, Apple was ordered to pay nearly $700,000 — a small amount for a company that reported nearly $1 billion in profit in the December quarter, but a large moral victory for bloggers, journalists and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which helped defend against Apple’s subpoenas.

Which brings us to the iPhone. Is it just me, or did anyone else
see the launch of Apple’s new iPhone as a security nightmare in
the making? I’m talking about the increasing number of employees
who will be buying these things, putting company information on
them, and then losing them.

For once, I completely agree with Enderle. Corporate IT departments should block the iPhone, at least until June.

The AirPort Extreme (802.11n) shares storage devices based on the format used to initialize the storage device. For example, if HFS-plus formatting was used, AFP and SMB/CIFS protocols are used to share the device on the network. If FAT16 or FAT32 was used, SMB/CIFS protocols are used.

(Via Jesper, who quipped that he has a bridge for sale to anyone who still doubts that the new AirPort Extreme base station is running an embedded version of OS X.)

Unless updates are issued for prior releases of Mac OS X, the clocks on computers running 10.3 or earlier will not show the correct time for three weeks in March and one week in November, in perpetuity.

I suspect Apple’s unofficial stance on this is that users of pre-10.4 versions of Mac OS X are on their own and need to manage these time changes manually.

Now with tabbed editing. I love the drag-and-drop implementation — you can drag to reorder tabs within a window, drag tabs between windows, and drag tabs out into their own new windows.

However, it highlights an ever-more-common conflict in Mac OS X’s standard keyboard shortcuts. SubEthaEdit 2.6 still binds ⌘T to Show Fonts and sticks New Tab with ⌘⌥N. Long-term, I think Show Fonts needs a new standard shortcut; ⌘T belongs to New Tab.

Available for pre-order today, expected to ship in mid-February. $199 through the end of April, then the price goes to $299. I still think adding “Photoshop” to the name is silly, but in practical terms, Lightroom is clearly a worthy rival to Aperture, and is highly innovative both in terms of its UI and its programming architecture (with significant chunks written in the Lua scripting language).

Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. cellphone carrier, passed on the
chance to be the exclusive distributor of the iPhone almost two
years ago, balking at Apple’s rich financial terms and other
demands.

Among other things, Apple wanted a percentage of the monthly
cellphone fees, say over how and where iPhones could be sold and
control of the relationship with iPhone customers, said Jim Gerace,
a Verizon Wireless vice president. “We said no. We have nothing bad
to say about the Apple iPhone. We just couldn’t reach a deal that
was mutually beneficial.”

I’m sure Apple negotiated with all the major U.S. carriers, but if their last talks with Verizon were two years ago, I’m not sure how close to a deal this could have been.

Super-simple new web app. You set up a meeting with a couple of proposed dates and times. Diarised emails the attendees, asks them which times they prefer, then reports back to you with the best times for the meeting.

Monday, 29 January 2007

Screensaver for Mac OS X that takes your open windows and sends them spinning and flying about your screen, like weightless objects in outer space; they snap back into place when you dismiss the saver. Freeware. (Thanks to Ian Roberts.)

A lot of readers are emailing me about the Macintosh on Bill Gates’s desk in this picture from the ’80s in yesterday’s New York Times profile of Steve Ballmer. It’s not really all that surprising — back then, writing Mac software was a much bigger part of Microsoft’s overall business. This story from Andy Hertzfeld is a perfect example — he had a one-on-one meeting with Gates to negotiate a deal to write Switcher, the first multi-tasking implementation for the Mac.

Here it is, version 2.0 of Shaun Inman’s Mint — the world’s best web stats tracker. $19 to upgrade, $30 for a new license. Improvements in version 2.0 include everything from additional stats to significant layout improvements (e.g., a single-column mode well-suited for Wiis and mobile browsers). The improvements to the Referrers pane alone are worth $19 to me.

One of the top search results in Google (number 6 at the time of this writing), is “Google”. Hundreds of millions of users are trying to get to Google through Google. Does this make any sense? No. But it shows that users don’t think about Google as a specific web page, they think of it as the service, an essential part of the internet experience. They’re using this service to get to the page they want: in this case, Google.

Sunday, 28 January 2007

Steven Levy is editing the 2006 edition of Best Technology Writing, and is looking for submissions:

So now I’m asking for your help. The good people at Michigan are collecting nominees for the best writing on tech subjects in the year just passed. This could include magazine, newpaper or online articles and columns, and certainly includes blog postings. Don’t think of “tech” too narrowly– I won’t! Ideally, though, the choices will be grokable by a general audience, and no longer than 5000 words.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among the A-list blogs. Very few of
them linked to my exclusive four-hour video tour of Intel’s new chip
plant, preferring instead to briefly mention that Intel has invented
a new type of chip.

Admittedly my video wasn’t very interesting at first, but if you
look closely at the 2:13 mark, you can see a man in one of those
bunny suits (think Intel ads rather than Donnie Darko!!!) walk past
the window carrying some kind of high-tech tool. It’s not that clear
because I dripped sweat on the lens again, but it’s there.

You know those stupid “here’s a thumbnail preview of the site this link points to” things that are suddenly appearing on a bunch of web sites when you hover the mouse over a link? They’re from a company called Snap, and the second question in their FAQ gives you a way to set a cookie to turn them off.

And if you have these things on your site, turn them off. They’re stupid and distracting.

The hits just keep coming from the internal Microsoft emails that are being released as evidence in the anti-trust suit in Iowa. This one is a thread of comments in the wake of Mac OS X Tiger’s unveiling at WWDC 2004. Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism, wrote:

Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server
and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did
system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and
… my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I
just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

The Advanced Parking Guidance System works only if the spot is six
and a half feet longer than the car — the sort of spot, in other
words, that the average Manhattan parker comes upon about once every
14 or 15 years. The only parker who might need help from a guidance
system to get into such a spot is a parker who is driving himself
home from rotator cuff surgery. For Lexus to offer a self-parking
system for a spot that size is the equivalent of some high-end
kitchen-equipment manufacturer offering a self-carving system that
only works on meatloaf.

Friday, 26 January 2007

“There are some Warnock fonts that are absolutely spectacular that we use within the company. John Warnock, as a founder of the company, did some amazing fonts.”

John Warnock, along with his cofounder at Adobe, Chuck Geschke, invented the PostScript language. He is not a typographer. Warnock Pro, the excellent typeface Narayen is apparently referring to, was designed by Robert Slimbach.

I, personally, do not like the Mac — snappy response aside — [because] of
the way it feels when saving files. I know this is silly, but I’ve
never felt comfortable with it. It was mushy in some weird way
that always gave me the creeps. I always felt that if something
weird happened on a Mac I would never be able to recover a file.
I’ve never felt that way with a PC. I figured that with a PC, I
could take the hard disk out and easily put it into another
machine and then go exploring the drive without worry.

Is it just me, or is this crazy talk?

This is a minor thing to people who would be fearful of removing a
hard disk, and that, to me, would be a typical art director at an ad
agency who used a Mac. He’s buying the machine because it looks good
and he/she likes the way it feels.

So Mac-using art directors are the ones who make their computer decisions based on irrational feelings — but Dvorak, the technical genius who isn’t fearful of removing a hard disk, he makes his platform decision based on how “mushy in some weird way” it feels when files are written to disk.

Fog Creek Copilot is a remote tech support service that lets one person control another computer remotely, much like VNC or RDC, with the advantage that it requires zero configuration, works through firewalls, and installs nothing.

The big news for Mac users is that version 2.0 now runs on Mac OS X, and 24-hour day passes cost just $5. (Monthly plans start at $20.)

Josh Williams, responding to some clown who thinks to be a successful “web 2.0” company, you have to charge in micropayments:

Bob says our pricing strategy is “out of this world,” and rips our
Gold plan for charging a business $24 a month to send up to 250
invoices. Let’s do some math. Our Silver plan cuts off at 50
invoices. So if you’re on the Gold plan that means you’re
typically sending over 50 invoices a month. 50 invoices at $.50 a
pop (as Bob suggests) would cost you $25. Then, we only would make
30 cents on the dollar due to the merchant fees, and we’re left
with about 8 bucks. Congratulations, you’ve now successfully
created a business model where both the buyer and seller are
getting screwed. The bank however makes out pretty well.

A large-scale study found that those who had regularly used mobiles for longer than 10 years were almost 40 per cent more likely to develop nervous system tumours called gliomas near to where they hold their phones.

Better order the Bluetooth headset with that iPhone. Update: Oops, wait, Bluetooth = radio, so that’s no good, either. At least the iPhone headphones work as a wired headset; that’s apparently the way to go.

Since I mentioned Enso earlier, it’s probably worth pointing to Launchy, a freeware Quicksilver/LaunchBar-style launcher for Windows. Two Windows software links on DF in one day — I’m pretty sure that’s a record. (Thanks to Rob Allen.)

More from Jim Cramer on his scoop that AT&T intends to offer free service with the iPhone:

Management sounded like kids when talking about the iPhone and how
it was going to remake AT&T and that it was the greatest invention
they’ve ever seen.

Now, AT&T’s all about market share, and if you read between the
lines, I think you see a strategy coming where the device’s $500
price point is preserved but the service contract is greatly
reduced. I think that AT&T — and not Apple — is the key to this
next leg, and CEO Stan Sigman can make it happen.

Update: Here’s a link to Cingular’s Q4 2006 conference call (26 MB MP3 file). If you liked Cingular CEO Stan Sigman’s riveting performance onstage during the Macworld keynote, you’re going to love this. He talks about the iPhone only briefly, just past the 28:00 mark, and says nothing about any sort of free service plans. Update 2: I created a 300 KB MP3 consisting of just the 43-second snippet where Sigman talks about iPhone; save yourself some bandwidth.

Nice catch from AppleInsider. Seems kind of weird to imagine having to load a disc underneath your notebook, but as Apple’s patent application states, as notebooks get smaller and thinner the real estate along the edges gets smaller and more valuable.

Two bits of news on the “What CPU does the iPhone use?” front. First, AppleInsider, citing “people familiar with the new Apple handset”, reports that the CPU is from Samsung. That contradicts the report last week in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in which the CEO of Intel Italy was quoted saying the CPU is from Marvell.

What’s interesting is that the article in Il Sole 24 Ore has been revised and no longer includes any mention of the iPhone at all. Right down the memory hole.

My best guess is that Apple has iPhone prototypes using different ARM-family CPUs and they haven’t yet decided or finalized the deal. It doesn’t take six full months for FCC approval of a new device, so I think they have a bit of time to tinker before they need to set it in stone.

Yet another sign that Apple’s dropping of the “Computer” from its name is not a sign of a shift in the company’s focus: Hans Derycke was watching the Steve Jobs keynote from MWNY 2000 and noticed that the credits and copyright are assigned to “Apple Inc.”

Apple has been referring to itself, marketing-wise and promotionally, as just plain “Apple” since shortly after Jobs returned to the company. My guess is that maybe they wanted to change the legal name to Apple Inc. back in 2000 but were held up by legal wrangles with The Beatles’s Apple Corps; that they’ve now officially changed the name might be another sign of an impending deal to get The Beatles catalog in the iTunes Store.

One sign of good UI design is when you take a guess how something should work, and you’re right. Khoi Vinh had that experience with Address Book when he double-clicked a vCard file containing updated information for an existing contact in his database.

New utility for Windows users, sort of like a cross between Quicksilver and Mac OS X’s Services menu. Aza Raskin, the president of Humanized, is the son of the late Jef Raskin, to whom the software is dedicated. One interesting idea is that to enter the mode where you type Enso commands, you just hold down the Caps Lock key. Seems a little vague overall, and the demo video emphasizes hype instead of clarifying exactly how it works.

Wednesday, 24 January 2007

I don’t think this is outrageous, certainly not by Microsoft’s historical standards, but I do think Microsoft knew that this sort of arrangement is against Wikipedia’s policies. “We think IBM is doing the same thing” is not a good defense.

Paul Kim on how Java desktop application development turned into such a convoluted mess:

It quickly became evident that the people involved from the JavaSoft side had little to no experience with OO and/or GUI programming. I realized that if these were the people in charge of implementing the GUI toolkit for a platform, then the project is going to be a mess. Various design discussions ensued with the people who didn’t have any real experience with OO programming or developing and shipping real desktop apps overriding those who did.

Terrific interview with Adobe’s Mark Hamburg about Lightroom’s user interface, particularly its use of task-oriented panels rather than Photoshop-style dialog boxes:

Mark Hamburg: So the diagram that I would draw for this: Photoshop with a big circle in the middle, and you go out to various things; you go out and come back, you go out and come back. The model for Lightroom was to say “We still have a core but the user never actually goes into it. The user just goes and bounces around the things that are on the outside of the circle.”

As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

As I wrote back in June, if the record industry really wants interoperability, they’re going to have to abandon DRM.

Single-frame (i.e. 1/29th of one second) ad for McDonald’s appears on Food Network. I’m hoping maybe this is some sort of mistake — but one of Kottke’s readers emailed him to say they do it all the time. Andy Baio points out that studies have shown this sort of thing doesn’t actually work, but the fact that they’d even try it is rather disturbing.

(And of course now I’m thinking about the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden takes a job as a movie theater projectionist…)

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs was questioned by government investigators leading the U.S. probe into backdated stock options grants at the company, lawyers familiar with the matter said.

Jobs met with officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department last week in San Francisco, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the interviews are confidential. Apple said last month an internal review found “no misconduct” by Jobs or current management.

Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Terrific analysis from Andy Baio on how long it takes for Oscar nominated films to be pirated. (Answer: not long.) He also draws an interesting conclusion that the more effort a studio exerts trying to keep a screener (a DVD distributed to Oscar voters) from being bootlegged, the worse chance that movie has of winning an award. The anti-copying measures make it less likely screeners will even watch it.

Methinks the movie industry is getting closer and closer to their date with a Napster-style reckoning.

I tested Vista on three computers. On a new, top-of-the-line
Hewlett-Packard laptop, with Vista preinstalled, it worked smoothly
and quickly. It was a pleasure.

On a three-year-old H-P desktop, a Vista upgrade installed itself
fine. But even though this computer had a full gigabyte of memory
and what was once a high-end graphics card, Vista Ultimate reverted
to the Basic user interface. And even then, it ran so slowly and
unsteadily as to make the PC essentially unusable.

Mac OS X is the only desktop operating system I know of that has gotten faster, rather than slower, with each major release. The classic Mac OS was just as guilty as Windows in this regard. (Going from System 6 to System 7 was painful.)

Sure, part of it is that 10.0 was just so damn slow, but I think it’s a sign that Apple’s executives value engineering as a core principle. Apple spends engineering resources to improve the performance of existing code. Marketing-driven companies never do this because you can’t use “Many things are now a little bit faster than they used to be” as a selling point for an upgrade. I suspect this is a big part of why OS X appears to run so well on the iPhone.

My goal with this was to do the simplest thing possible while still ending up with something useful. It’s a relatively short read by design — probably about twenty minutes. Essentially, you’re shown how to launch Xcode, create a project, launch Interface Builder, add a few items and compile the result. There’s no code, but we do bask in the glow of NSTextView’s rich text handling.

Scott Rosenberg’s excellent new book, which was supposed to be a
Soul of a New Machine for the hottest open source startup of the
decade, ends up, in frustration, with Scott cutting the story short
because Chandler 1.0 was just not going to happen any time soon (and
presumably Rosenberg couldn’t run the risk that we wouldn’t be using
books at all by the time it shipped, opting instead to absorb
knowledge by taking a pill).

Still, it’s a great look at one particular type of software project:
the kind that ends up spinning and spinning its wheels without
really going anywhere because the vision was too grand and the
details were a little short.

Suite of design apps that seem intended to compete squarely against Adobe’s Creative Suite for the Windows professional design market. (Please, no snickers about that being an oxymoron.) So now Adobe is getting platform-specific competition from both Apple and Microsoft. The danger to Adobe is that they’ll get out-Windowsed on one end and out-Mac’ed on the other while they attempt to straddle both platforms.

Good criticism overall, but it’s a tricky spot for the Twitter team. A big part of Twitter’s appeal is its nearly utter simplicity. My guess is Twitter will eventually accommodate most of his complaints, though.

This Comes v. Microsoft antitrust case in Iowa is a veritable gold mine for Microsoft internal communications dirt. This PDF includes a memo written in 1997 by James Plamondon, a Microsoft technical evangelist. From p. 48 (the strike-through humor is in the original):

Analysts are people who are paid to take a stand, while always
trying to appear to be disinterested observers (since the
appearance of independence maximizes the price they can charge for
selling out). Treat them as you would treat nuclear weapons — as
an important part of your arsenal, which you want to keep out of
the hands of the enemy. Bribe Hire them to
produce “studies” that “prove” that your technology is superior to
the enemy’s, and that it is gaining momentum faster.

New file system plug-in from Google’s Greg Miller, for use with Amit Singh’s MacFUSE:

SpotlightFS is a MacFUSE file system that creates true smart folders, where the folders’ contents are dynamically generated by querying Spotlight. This differs from Finder’s version of smart folders, which are really plist files with a .savedSearch file extension. Since SpotlightFS smart folders are true folders, they can be used from anywhere — including the command line.

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Monday, 22 January 2007

Whatever you may think of Jobs, he’s had the same vision for the last twenty years: the design of a product, the art of it, is just as important as the engineering. This is a lesson that the PC industry needs to take to heart.

He has some great quotes from Steve Jobs on the role of design and art in the computer industry. (Worth noting, perhaps, that Atwood is far from an Apple fanatic.)

Manton Reece’s nifty utility for converting and copying movies, photos, and music to your Wii. Version 2.0 adds the ability to share photos and music over your local network. $14 regularly, available for just $9 until the end of January.

Even if the iPhone remains closed, it’s an advantage for Apple because Apple’s own engineers get to use Cocoa to write the iPhone apps. Otherwise they’d be stuck using something worse or making something new from scratch.

I guess the part I don’t understand is the target audience. Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don’t have a favorite editor already?

This is an insightful observation, but no one else had the guts to say it (yours truly included). Back when I started Daring Fireball in 2002, there were two weblogs that served as significant inspirations. One was Dive Into Mark, and this is a perfect example why.

Sunday, 21 January 2007

Desktop Java never worked because Sun tried to build their own OS on top of the real OS, duplicating every API and feature. This led to terrible bloat, making every app as heavyweight to launch as Photoshop. Worse, the GUI portions of the Java platform are awful, because Sun is a server company with no core competency at GUIs. The APIs are too clumsy to code to, and compared to any decent Mac app, the results look like a Soviet tractor built on a Monday.

In short, Cocoa kicks Java’s ass for developing any app where the UI matters. That Cocoa is at the heart of iPhone app development gives credence to Steve Jobs’s claim that the iPhone is “five years ahead” of anyone else. What other phone or PDA OS has developer tools and frameworks that compare to Cocoa?

A November 2003 e-mail by Windows chief Jim Allchin, made public
today as part of the company’s Iowa antitrust trial, sheds new
light on the frustration that the company felt with its digital
music device partners, before deciding to come out with its own
Zune music player and service to challenge Apple’s iPod.

I almost feel bad for Allchin for these emails that are coming out
as a result of this lawsuit. In this one, he talks about his
experience with a top-of-the-line Creative player, and pretty much
trashes the entire experience, from the player itself (“I mean it is
ugly, not smooth to the touch (hard edges and uncomfortable to hold,
etc.), fragile (easy to break), the controls are difficult and they
hurt your finger if you use the ‘jog’ dial much at all”) to
the software to the synching.

He concludes by writing, “I think I should talk with Jobs. Right
now, I think I should open up a dialog for support of the iPOD.
Unless something changes, the iPOD will drive people away from WMP.” The emails are from about a month afterApple’s first version of iTunes for Windows.

In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it’s roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there’s no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail.

Welcome to the social.

What kind of moron looks at the Zune’s restrictive “three days, three listens” DRM sharing policy and thinks, “That’s just too liberal?”

As part of my recent podcast saturation bombing campaign, I appeared as a guest on this week’s episode of Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur’s Net@Nite podcast. Dan Dorato of Uneasysilence was the other guest. We mostly talked about, what else?, the iPhone.

Dorato seems particularly down on the iPhone — among other things, he said, “I am certainly not going to buy one” and “It’s another Newton” — but most of his complaints seem to be that he doesn’t believe it’s going to be as good as Apple claims. I.e., he thinks Apple’s 5-hour battery life claim is wildly optimistic.

According to the biography of former Apple CEO John Sculley,
Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, Jobs launched the Mac in 1984 even though
the “Mac” trademark belonged to another company.

“Knowing we would face trademark challenges over Steve’s decision to
launch Macintosh under its original codename, Al (Eisenstat, Apple’s
general counsel) had argued at full volume that Steve should pick
another name for the computer,” Sculley writes on page 208.

Video interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, where he’s asked for his initial reaction to the iPhone:

“$500! Fully subsidized! With a plan! I said that is the most
expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business
customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a
very good email machine.”

Here’s how it’s going to go. Starting now, Microsoft will mock the iPhone. They will mock the price, they will mock the closed software platform, and they will say that phone users demand and crave the wide variety of products in the Windows Mobile market.

No one outside Apple has seen the inside of an iPhone, so most of this is just speculation. But even if we concede for the sake of argument that these part costs are accurate, that doesn’t mean the margins would be 50 percent. The cost to produce an iPhone is greater than the cost of its components. It’s not like they’re shipping kits of tiny pieces you have to solder yourself.

If they’re really arguing that someone could produce something with the same features and display as the iPhone and sell it for a profit for just $300 or $350, then how come no one is?

I rag on the rumor sites when they’re wrong, so it’s only fair to point out when they hit a home run. This story from a month ago on AppleInsider pretty much nailed the “OS X at the heart of Apple’s consumer electronics” strategy announced last week at Macworld Expo.

And there are no lags, no pauses, no waiting for the slickly animated UI to catch up with you, even when you’re scrolling through a stack of album art that’s flopping past your finger in 3D: It’s liquid.

Reporting for The Washington Post on Apple’s Q1 2007 financial results, they quote, of all people, Rob Enderle, who offers this golden nugget:

Analyst Rob Enderle said Apple might soon start to feel more
pressure from its longtime rival Microsoft, which is about to
launch a big marketing splash for Windows Vista, the biggest
upgrade of its operating system since the arrival of Windows XP in
2001. That “will probably keep people out of Apple stores for a
while,” Enderle said.

Please, Mr. Enderle, offer me a wager as to whether Apple Stores will suffer a downturn in either foot traffic or sales upon the release of Vista.

A spokesperson with Apple provided me with a response that explains that the updater will be available for purchase from their online store at a “nominal fee” in order “to comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for revenue recognition, which generally require that we charge for significant feature enhancements, such as 802.11n, when added to previously purchased products.”

Some sort of video conferencing VOIP phone, apparently. They’re billing it as “The iPhone for grownups”, which seems really weird given that the product shown in the photo is not a mobile phone. What makes this antagonism interesting, though, is a look at the company’s board of directors, which includes: Gil Amelio, Steve Wozniak, and Ellen Hancock.

Electronics firms are not going to respond to the iPhone, because in their eyes, the iPhone couldn’t possibly be a success. Just like when the iPod was released, they will sit back absolutely convinced that device will to fail to capture the market.

He makes some good points here. Rather than try to compete with the iPod in terms of experience, consumer electronics companies have stuck to their traditional “feature count matters more than experience” design model. (Microsoft’s Zune may be the only exception.) The iPhone doesn’t do more than other phones; it just does the same things way, way better.

According to The Sun, the announcement might come in a Super Bowl commercial. The numerous Beatles appearances during last week’s Macworld keynote suggest that something is afoot. (My thought during the keynote was that it might be the “One More Thing”.)

What sealed the deal, though, was a quiet milestone that the iPhone hits in design sophistication: it’s the first mobile device that I know of — and certainly the most elegant — to use the typeface Helvetica throughout its interface.

Robert Scoble suspects Steve Jobs of “sandbagging” with regarding to allowing third-party software developers to write apps for the iPhone. Scoble writes:

I think Steve is trying to get a better deal from Jonathan
Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. After all, Java already is
running on a billion phones.

Jobs may well be spinning with his statements regarding third-party iPhone apps in general (and I hope he is), but his disdain for Java is completely straightforward. Java is no more relevant to iPhone app development than it is to Mac app development. iPhone apps are written in Cocoa and are designed specifically for the iPhone user interface. Cross-platform crippity-crap Java apps would stick out just as sorely on the iPhone as they do on the Mac.

Wednesday, 17 January 2007

$1 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2007, up from $565 million a year ago.

“This one was for the record books,” Apple’s chief financial officer
Peter Oppenheimer said in an interview.

Apple shipped 1.6 million Macs and more than 21 million iPods during
the quarter, representing a growth of 28 percent and 50 percent
respectively from the year-ago holiday season.

Those are both incredible numbers. 21 million iPods is bit less than my prediction of 24 million, but way up from last year’s 14 million and also ahead of all the analysts’s expectations. And it used to be that 1 million Macs made for for a good quarter.

Glenn Fleishman, reporting on an email Steve Jobs sent to someone inquiring about the rumored $5 charge to enable 802.11n Wi-Fi on capable Macs sold prior to Apple’s recent AirPort updates:

Jobs replied, simply, “It’s the law,” which would confirm that the
Sarbanes-Oxley requirement that seemed bizarre to me is, in fact,
correct. In several reports, the law is cited as requiring
different accounting for earnings on products that are shipped and
later provide new functionality that wasn’t initially advertised.

Back when the 5.5G iPod were announced in September, there was a bit of speculation about why certain of the new features, like searching, weren’t made available via a firmware update for owners of original 5G iPods. A couple of friends at Apple told me their best guess was that it was for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley.

The origins of these bits and pieces, however, is not what’s
important about the iPhone. What’s important is that, for the first
time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one
device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal
human beings. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs; that’s the genius of
Apple.

The lack of the ability to install just any software will greatly
mitigate the risk of malicious code on Apple iPhones. Can
malicious software exist? Will malicious software exist? Probably,
but the amount of malicious software will definitely not be on the
scale as it is today with Windows and likely not reach the levels
of current malware for current mobile devices.

Why compare to Windows? Why not compare to the amount of malicious software plaguing Mac OS X? Start with the current level of malware on Mac OS X and then remove the ability for users to add third-party apps that haven’t been vetted by Apple.

Tuesday, 16 January 2007

I forgot to point out in my BBEdit 8.6 blurb that it can now read and write binary plist files directly. Open a binary plist file in BBEdit and it displays in XML format; make changes and it gets written back out to disk as a binary plist again. Great for preference file hacking.

This is the bridge for writing Cocoa apps using Ruby that is going to ship with Leopard. I really like some of this syntax quite a bit; my gut feeling is that writing Cocoa apps with Ruby is going to be one of the sleeper hit features in Leopard, from a developer perspective.

It feels small, and quite thin. The screen is remarkably responsive — I could sense no delay between when I pressed an on-screen button and when the phone responded to that finger press. I typed on its on-screen keyboard with my index finger, and after about a minute I felt that I was already well on my way to be a proficient iPhone typist.

“Remarkable responsiveness”, if it holds up in the actual shipping units in June, is going to be a key aspect of the iPhone’s user experience. Any sort of perceptible lag could break the illusion that you’re actually touching things, as opposed to the more abstract feeling that you’re using your finger to manipulate a UI.

I frequently need to read manual pages from Suns and Linux
systems, but prefer to read in BBEdit. Today’s trick facilitates
this, by grabbing the manual page from a remote machine via ssh,
unformatting it with col, and dumping it into a BBEdit window
(which doesn’t ask to be saved).

Robert McMillan, reporting for IDG News Service on speculation regarding iPhone security, spoke to David Maynor:

Because the iPhone will be new and relatively untested, but
running a familiar operating system, Maynor believes that there
will be plenty of places for hackers to look for bugs. “My feeling
is that this is going to be one of the easier devices to find
vulnerabilities in,” he said.

We can only hope iPhone users suffer from malware the same way Mac users do.

Update: According to this thread on the MacFUSE development mailing list, sshfs performance through MacFUSE is pretty poor. Update 2: Chris Pepper’s testing shows sshfs via MacFUSE outperforming an SMB connection to the same server.

Monday, 15 January 2007

I’ve heard from people who were at the Jobs presentation this week that there was a wire connecting his cell phone to something. I can’t tell you myself, because I am not allowed to attend Apple press events. If I were there, I would tell you.

Jobs specifically called attention to the cable during the keynote, explaining that it was a custom rig that allowed the display from his iPhone to be mirrored to the big screen on stage.

The iPhone’s software certainly isn’t complete, but the prototypes apparently work as advertised. David Pogue even has video of one in action, no cables attached.

Steve made a comment during the keynote which, paraphrased, was something like: “I hope you never know how amazing this is.” Having been struggling with half-baked smartphones for over 5 years, I know EXACTLY how amazing it is.

I’m collecting links like this. I’m thinking they’ll make for a nice laugh in about a year or so.

Lastly, the iPhone is a defensive product. It is mainly designed to protect the iPod, which is coming under attack from mobile manufacturers adding music players to their handsets. Yet defensive products don’t usually work — consumers are interested in new things, not reheated versions of old things.

Right. The iPhone isn’t a new thing, it’s just a reheated iPod.

Also great is Lynn’s wishlist for features that would truly constitute “a fresh blast of competition”:

Or with never-ending batteries? Or chargers that don’t weigh three times as much as the phone?

Never-ending batteries? Jiminy, why hasn’t anyone ever thought of that before? Oh, that’s right, because of the laws of physics.

Jason Santa Maria, worried that his “working man hands” are too fat of finger for the iPhone virtual keypad, wonders if a horizontal mode is in the works. (As he shows in a mockup, it wouldn’t leave much room above.)

AirPort Extreme, AirPort Disk turns almost any external USB hard
drive into a shared drive. Simply connect the drive to the USB
port on the back of your AirPort Extreme and — voila — all the
documents, videos, photos, and other files on the drive instantly
become available to anyone on the secure network, Mac and PC
alike. It’s perfect for backups, collaborative projects, and more.

Perhaps someone should tell Steve about one of the advantages of
supporting Java: managed applications in Java or .Net are inherently
safer than unmanaged applications. Unmanaged applications, written
in languages like C++ or Objective C (the standard OSX programming
language), are closer to the hardware and can suffer from problems
like wild pointers, buffer overruns, and incorrectly using
deallocated memory. Managed applications don’t have pointers and
leave memory management to the virtual machine they run in.

They also have the advantage of being compiled once into a portable
intermediate representation (bytecode) that can be run on any
hardware architecture. C/C++ applications must be built separately
for each and every architecture you want to support.

Steve Jobs doesn’t give a shit about pointers. And he most certainly
doesn’t give a shit about apps written for multiple platforms. What
would an app written for cross-platform compatibilty look like on an
iPhone? No other phone has a UI even vaguely like the iPhone’s. The
only apps on the iPhone are Dashboard widgets and apps written
specifically for the iPhone using Cocoa. This is to be considered a
feature, not a limitation. If you consider it a limitation, the
iPhone is not for you.

Jobs’s stated fear that opening the iPhone to third-party software
might bring down Cingular’s network, on the other hand, sounds like
poppycock. Plenty of other phone platforms allow third-party apps to
run.

Another clever little portable camera tripod; instead of suction (like the aforelinked Mosterpod) it uses bendable wraparound legs. And also unlike the Monsterpod, there are versions that support SLRs. $40 at Amazon. Update: Ends up the Monsterpod doesn’t use suction, it uses viscoelasticity — a goo that’s both viscous and elastic.

Randall Stross, in the second-most-emailed article published in the Sunday New York Times:

Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod
as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as
your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that
FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief.
You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever.
Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.

No. You can “pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod” and never once come into contact with a FairPlay-protected song or video. If you don’t like FairPlay’s restrictions — and there are plenty of good reasons not to — then don’t buy any, and rip your music from regular CDs.

As Camino is to Firefox, Correo aims to be to Thunderbird. Still pretty nascent, though. It’ll be interesting to see how it compares to the Thunderbird-derived version of Eudora, if that ever devaporizes. (Via Hawk Wings.)

Pre-release version of Camino includes built-in (no plug-in hacks required) support for saved browser sessions: Quit Camino and when you relaunch it, it automatically restores your previous open windows and tabs.

The only hitch is that the session saving feature is off by default and there’s still no UI to enable it; this forum thread contains the instructions for turning it on with a directive in your users.js preference file.

Saturday, 13 January 2007

FingerWorks was a company which was apparently acquired by Apple in 2005; their gestural touch-based input technology seems like something that might be used in the iPhone. (Thanks to DF reader Kenneth Miller.)

What makes Apple’s choice of processor for the iPhone interesting isn’t really which specific something-other-than-x86 CPU it is, but rather that they have OS X compiling and running on something other than PowerPC or x86 at all. Not surprising, but interesting.

Also, about renaming Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc., I could
swear Apple did that already a few years ago. Anyone else know
what I’m (apparently mis-) remembering? Whatever, I don’t see it
as a big deal. People fretting about the name change itself have
cause and effect reversed. The name reflects the product mix, not
the other way around.

The way I remember it, Apple began calling themselves “Apple” instead of “Apple Computer” right around the same time they switched from the six-color Apple logo to the monochrome logo. I.e. in terms of their advertising and marketing, they’ve been just plain “Apple” since the end of the ’90s. Now they’re just officially changing the legal name of the corporation to match.

Pure conjecture on my part, but perhaps the fact that they didn’t change this earlier had something to do with their legal wranglings with The Beatles’ Apple Corps.

Unless this is some sort of prank, Amazon is taking pre-orders for unlocked no-contract iPhones; €999 for the 8 GB, €899 for the 4 GB. (That’s roughly $1,300 and $1,150, respectively, but don’t forget that the dollar is way down against the euro. Update: I forgot that German prices include a 19 percent VAT, too.)

At this writing, the 8 GB iPhone is their top-selling item in electronics; the 4 GB model is way down at #58.

See also this article from Reg Hardware regarding similar laws in Europe. The gist of it seems to be that you can’t just hold on to a trademark that you never use, and Cisco’s launch of an “iPhone” VOIP handset last month might be too little too late. (In their filing for an extension to hold onto the trademark, they needed to show a photograph of the trademark in use; they submitted a photo of an existing handset package with an “iPhone” sticker placed outside the shrinkwrap.)

However, Jobs has a reason to make the iPhone live up to its hype,
M:Metrics analyst Seamus McAteer said: 1993’s failed Newton
handheld.

“There’s one big black blotch on his resume. … This is his chance to
wipe that clean, and I don’t think he’s going to screw it up,”
McAteer said.

Really? “1993’s failed Newton handheld” is a blotch on Steve Jobs’s résumé? The same Steve Jobs who was booted from Apple in 1985 and didn’t return until 1996, and whose only involvement with the Newton was to pull the plug on it?

I mean, holy shit, how stupid does an analyst have to be before a reporter decides he’s just too dumb to be quoted?

The Macalope responds to iPhone critics Paul Kedrosky and Robert Scoble:

“How do you operate your phone under a table at a meeting”? This
is exactly why Apple’s design is better than Microsoft’s. The five
jackasses who need to do that — instead of paying attention to the
meeting — can keep stroking their Blackberrys under the table.

In the comments, Robert Scoble claims that “if Microsoft had shipped this you’d be deriding it as the worst cell phone ever shipped.” What kind of sense does that make? I think most people might have had a stroke if Microsoft had shipped something this innovative.

FUSE makes it possible to implement a very functional file system
in a normal program rather than requiring a complex addition to
the operating system. More importantly, the FUSE API is very easy
to program for. The large number of interesting and/or useful FUSE
file systems out there is a testament to this. An often-cited
example of such a useful file system is sshfs, which until now was
not available on Mac OS X.

Outstanding resource — there are numerous answers here that I haven’t seen anywhere else, including that the iPhone’s web browser supports neither Flash nor Java, and that the camera doesn’t (at least yet) support video.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you
load any software on them,” [Jobs] said. “That doesn’t mean
there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them
coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it
means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Markoff points out that even if Apple maintains complete control
over native software running on iPhone, third-party developers still
might have an in by writing web apps targeted at the iPhone’s web
browser. The problem with that is that web apps, even really
clever web apps, are never going to be as cool UI-wise as native apps.

One of my first negative reactions to the iPhone during the keynote is that now matter how well done, the on-screen keyboard couldn’t possibly be as good as a keyboard using physical buttons. David Pogue got to spend an hour with one of the prototypes, and concurs:

The iPhone is not, however, a BlackBerry killer. The absence of a
physical keyboard makes it versatile, but also makes typing
tedious. …

Fortunately, you don’t have to be especially precise. Even if you
hit the wrong “keys” accidentally, the super-smart software
considers adjacent keys — and corrects your typos automatically.
If what you actually managed to type is “wrclme,” the software
proposes “welcome.” You tap the Space bar to accept the fix. It
works beautifully.

Thursday, 11 January 2007

Despite being very close to an agreement, we had no substantive communication from Apple after 8pm Monday, including after their launch, when we made clear we expected closure. What were the issues at the table that kept us from an agreement? Was it money? No. Was it a royalty on every Apple phone? No. Was it an exchange for Cisco products or services? No.

Sort of sounds like what Cisco wanted was a legal arrangement with Apple to be “cool like you guys are”.

Here’s one that’s a VOIP handset selling on Amazon for $19. Then there’s the Teledex iPhone for use in hotels; and the Comwave iPhone which isn’t even a phone — it’s a VOIP telephone service and router-ish box.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling called the Cisco lawsuit “silly,”
adding there are several companies using the term iPhone for VOIP
products, and Cisco’s trademark is “tenuous at best.” “We’re the
first company to ever use the iPhone name for a cellphone,” he
said. “If Cisco wants to challenge us on it, we’re very confident
we’ll prevail.”

Brief interview by the one and only Merlin Mann with Jason Snell and me, talking about whether or not the iPhone is going to be open to third-party software development. (The answer, alas, is “no”, or at least “not yet”.)

This is just weird. Seems a bit reckless for Apple to launch this without the trademark rights in hand. It’s worth noting, by the way, that the prototype hardware units on display here at Macworld Expo do not have “iPhone” printed on them anywhere.

Weaknesses? Absolutely. You can’t download songs directly onto it from the iTunes store, you have to export them from a computer. And even though it’s got WiFi and Bluetooth on it, you can’t sync iPhone with a computer wirelessly. And there should be games on it. And you’re required to use it as a phone — you can’t use it without signing up for cellular service. Boo.

And:

The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton — who knew a thing or two about apples — they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

Did people really think that Apple, if — and it’s still an “if” — they produce a cell phone, was going to call it “iPhone”? The fact that iphone.com clearly belongs to someone else was a strong hint that they weren’t.

And, amazingly to me, iphone.com still points to a junky page from “The Internet Phone Company”. And I still haven’t heard any definitive answer regarding how Apple plans to use this name if Linksys claims the trademark and is using it for their own product.

What you cannot appreciate looking at iPhone photographs on your computer display is how amazing its screen is. 160 DPI is an amazing resolution — tiny, tiny text is amazingly legible. And the device itself is very thin.

The battery policy, though, is exactly like that of other iPods: it’s sealed inside the case, and is not swappable.

Remember back in November when Palm CEO Ed Colligan was quoted saying, with regard to a then-hypothetical Apple phone, “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Guess what? They’re just walking in.

Monday, 8 January 2007

This is not news — apparently it was released months ago and I just hadn’t heard about it — but Apple now offers a web-based interface for your iDisk. The UI is good and performance is great. It’s clearly the iDisk sibling to the new .Mac webmail UI.

What’s sick is that performance using the Finder is still so poor — there’s something inherently wrong that a web UI for iDisk is faster than using the Finder.

2nd Update: Thanks to DF reader Sean O’Leary, here’s a link to the full Journal story on another web site. It’s kind of a shitty story, really; one thrust of it is that iPod growth is slowing significantly, but they base this largely on projected iPod sales figures for 2007 from Morgan Stanley.

Don’t be fooled by imitators; Siracusa’s is the original keynote bingo. Siracusa writes:

The way I see it, the most important part of keynote bingo is the card itself. The choice and arrangement of squares documents the hopes and fears of the card maker, and perhaps the larger Mac community, at a particular point in time. And the detailed definitions for each square provide important context for each prediction.

Toast 8 brings TiVo and the Mac together for the first time,
enabling users to enjoy their favorite TV programs on their Mac,
burn them to disc, or easily convert them for viewing on a mobile
device such as an iPod or PSP.

Friday, 5 January 2007

I don’t personally feel the need for a full-screen writing mode, but many people do, and WriteRoom 2.0 looks like a great implementation of the idea. It’s a tricky problem to solve: How do you make an app that feels Mac-like but which hides the entire Mac user interface? WriteRoom 2 feels like the answer.

WriteRoom 1 was (and remains) freeware; version 2 costs $25. Unsurprisingly, the cheapskates popped out of the woodwork to complain about the price, and WriteRoom developer Jesse Grosjean seems at least somewhat disappointed by their criticism. This sort of thing is inevitable for indie developers: if your price is high enough for you to be successful, some people will complain, sometimes harshly, that it’s too high. But if no one is complaining about your price, it isn’t high enough.

Nicely written Valleywag piece by Paul Boutin on Steve Jobs’s Macworld Expo keynote. He’s got a good point: the teaser image on Apple.com hints that something big is going to be announced. That makes everyone think it’s a phone. But everyone expects a phone, and the biggest keynote announcement are usually very surprising.

The good news is that my friend Dan Benjamin has finally started The Hivelogic Podcast. The better news is that his first guest is yours truly, and we spend the whole show speculating about the possibility that Apple will announce a mobile phone at Macworld Expo next week.

But what I can’t believe is that a relatively mature product like
this sells for only $5000. And Garrett was including 50 hours of
consulting with the deal. By my reckoning that means he was
essentially selling 50 hours of work and throwing in the business
for free.

But this got me thinking. Will anybody sell me their product for
$5000? I am a good buyer. Make me an offer, and if I like what
you’ve got, I’ll pay cold hard cash for it. No installment crap.

A Taiwanese court has rejected Apple’s suit claiming that Luxpro’s MP3 players are infringing rip-offs of the first-generation iPod Shuffle. Luxpro is now countersuing for $100 million in damages stemming from the “valuable market opportunities” they lost as a result of Apple’s legal action.

They’ve even got a screenshot, albeit apparently from a development build they admit may be long out of date. Seems like something they almost have to add to the iWork suite, especially considering the demise of AppleWorks, but then again, I said the same thing last year.

And what is it about vinyl? It friggin breathes, and I don’t know how or why. I’ve brought all my iPod engineers in here to listen and try to figure it out. We’ve got “Golden Slumbers” on right now and Paul’s voice is making the hair on my neck stand up. It’s like he’s standing here in the room with us.

Imagine, in fancy, that some science fiction equivalent of Simon Wiesenthal built a time machine, travelled back to 1945 and returned to the present with a manacled Adolf Hitler. What should we do with him? Execute him? No, a thousand times no.

I’ve dealt with Brian Ball before when I had InstantGallery on macZOT last year and I’ve had a number of IM conversations with him since, my lasting impression is that he’s not someone I’d want to work with again.

There is no market. Yes, it would be cool. No, nobody in any statistically significant number would buy them. Apple has been out of the business of creating products that have no identifiable customer for a decade now.

Thursday, 4 January 2007

Includes a bunch of juicy comments from Murray and Ball. Ball’s username is “ideabrian”; most of his comments have been moderated beneath the default threshold, so you might need to click them to see them.

Update: It’s worth noting that this Digg story, despite 400+ diggs in the last 8 hours, was “buried” off the front page of Digg. Burying is intended as a way for the Digg community to flag spam and other inappropriate stories, but it can also be used by a cadre of individuals to make an article they don’t like simply disappear.

Adobe will announce on Thursday that it will revive a Mac version
of Premiere, the software maker’s video program aimed at
professional editors. The new Mac version will only run on
Intel-based Macs and will be part of a larger Adobe Production
Studio suite that will include Adobe Encore DVD and Adobe
Soundbooth.

Interesting. This says a lot about the Mac’s growing resurgence in the professional media-editing space. Or maybe it’s more about the surging popularity of Final Cut Pro.

Paul Thurrott responds to my “Speaking of Clowns”, but addresses none of my actual points of criticism (other than to reiterate his acclaim for Enderle’s nutty idea that “Steve Jobs” is a construct created by “Apple’s agency”). He finishes with this:

But I do know this: Both Enderle and Forrester are credible.

Enderle’s track record speaks for itself. As for Forrester, they themselves have stated that the report Enderle is talking about does not show a drop in iTunes Store music sales. They say iTunes sales are “leveling off”, meaning that growth is slowing, not that sales are dropping — a big difference.

(Most of the reports I’ve seen, though, indicate that iTunes Store growth continues to grow at about the same rate as iPod sales — the average number of iTunes Store songs sold per iPod has remained remarkably steady at about 20–25.)

I also feel it’s important for people to know what kind of business Mr. Ball conducted with me, in case people have potential business with him in the future. Consider this fair warning that things might not go too well.

This is really quite a story. Short version: Get your money up front if you sell an app to Brian Ball.

Sort of a bait and switch, in my opinion: this piece written by former Apple sales executive David Sobotta is billed as an insider’s view of what it’s like to have a meeting with Steve Jobs and what his thoughts are regarding tablet computers and mobile phones, but, really, it doesn’t seem like Sobotta ever had much face time at all with Jobs, and the piece is really mostly about Sobotta’s completely speculative predictions about Macworld Expo. The most interesting tidbit is Sobotta’s claim that Jobs is so secretive he won’t allow people to take notes when he speaks during meetings.

The best ever “what it’s like to meet with Steve Jobs” tale of recent vintage remains Cabel Sasser’s “The True Story of Audion”.

Wednesday, 3 January 2007

There is a lot of hard work that goes into making things easy and obvious (which is totally appropriate). However, I think sometimes developers can get caught in a trap of trying to make things too “perfect”.

The first Month of Apple Bugs exploit is out, and it’s an attack that takes advantage of a buffer overflow in QuickTime’s handler for “rtsp” URLs. Their example exploits are all Intel-specific, but it’s probably a potential problem for PowerPC systems, too. (It’s a problem with QuickTime, not Mac OS X, so it apparently works on Windows systems with QuickTime installed as well.)

The example exploits use the /usr/bin/say command to speak “Happy new year shit bag”, but if that works, it could just as easily do something destructive like deleting the contents of your home folder. If you want to play defense while waiting for Apple to fix the bug, you can disable ‘rtsp’ URLs using RCDefaultApp.